The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions.
Business organizations typically have a large number of people who are organized into hierarchical relationships. These relationships define lines of responsibility and reporting, and impose certain privileges and restrictions with regard to the access and management of information within the organization. In general, an organization may have any number of employees or departments that are related to one another in a large number of different supervisor and subordinates roles. To ensure the smooth operation of these organizations, access to organizational information must be strictly controlled to ensure that only authorized people have access to sensitive information. This strict access and control is often complicated by the fact that many large organizations have hierarchical structures that involve many different entities. Moreover, certain situations may require granting of information access outside the traditional hierarchical framework, such as a manager temporarily conferring certain supervisory rights to an administrative assistant.
The hierarchical organization of a company or large entity is typically represented in the form of the familiar top-down organization chart or tree. Present graphical user interface (GUI) techniques and management applications facilitate the design and modification of organization charts for various incarnations of a company. Such applications, however, generally treat the entities (people, departments, positions, etc.) as graphical elements that can easily be moved around a display area. In reality, however, each entity represents a resource that has a significant amount of data associated with it, some of which may be highly sensitive. Access to such information in an organization is often tightly controlled, based on the hierarchical relationships of these entities. Such granting of data access rights based on rigid, pre-defined hierarchical relationships can limit the flexibility of the organization with regard to certain management tasks, such as fast decision-making, flexible reporting, and evaluating different organization scenarios.
Present methods of reorganization or evaluating different organization chart scenarios typically involve the recalculation of hierarchical relationships and access rights for each individual of an organization. For a large organization, such a change can take a significant amount of time and require significant processing resources. Such processing costs and resource overhead often discourages the testing of certain “what-if” scenarios, succession plans, and reorganization models. Though data access to perform such tasks can be granted to certain individuals, this often forces a supervisor to grant total permissions to a subordinate, thus potentially allowing the subordinate to have too much access to corporate information. Temporary credentials can be generated and used, however, this also requires increased administrative processing.
What is needed therefore is an organization information management system that alters organizational access in real time in response to changes in the hierarchy.